Post navigation

Remember the OTHER Geneon?

I’m not talking about the one in Japan. What I mean is the other major anime/manga company to go kablooey in recent times, and that’s Central Park Media.

OK, they haven’t gone away completely yet (though, technically, neither has Geneon I don’t think), but it’s about as close to a dead company as one can get without being dead (ANN lists all of their “upcoming” manga releases with a date of 12/31/2012 – i.e. there is no release date).

They HAVE a catalog (an 08 one even!), but they haven’t released anything since July ’07 and haven’t licensed anything in who knows when, and most of their titles seem like Geneon’s: many are still available, but it appears once they’re gone, they’re gone. It looks like they may keep stock up at Right Stuf, but looking around other places saw a lot of “discontinued” and “out of stock” titles.

I thought about this because 2 of my first 8 or so DVD purchases were CPM titles (DNA2 and World of Narue) and the fact that I really wanted to read the Narue manga (and I decided to re-watch the Narue anime tonight). However, CPM only released through 4 volumes – and obviously in the state the company is in, no further volumes look to be forthcoming anytime soon (they’re on Volume 10 in Japan), plus the fact that I generally shy away from buying something unless I know it’s going to finish – which makes me leery of buying what they have released, if I can even find it anymore.

Of course, I guess I could actually take time to learn Japanese and buy the Japanese versions, though if I haven’t picked up enough Japanese after watching anime for 2 1/2 years to understand a conversation yet, I’m not sure how promising that prospect is either, and my impression that learning how to read and write Japanese is even harder than learning enough to understand what people are saying in conversation.

It’d be nice if CPM could somehow revive themselves, but I’m not exactly sure how they will, especially with the anime DVD market in the shape that it is. I guess one can eternally hope, though.

Post navigation

2 thoughts on “Remember the OTHER Geneon?”

I thought FUNimation might try to buy them up just to have extra content for the FUNimation Channel, if nothing else. But the, FUNimation isn’t in the manga business and I doubt they’d want to touch that stuff. :-/